Teaching writing at Indian universities

One feature of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 dwelt on the importance of each Indian student being able to write and express themselves meaningfully in their medium of education. Lately, the University Grants Commission (UGC) has issued guidelines indicating the significance of teaching academic writing at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The NEP 2020 talks generically about the ability to carry out these imperatives and emphasizes their implementation. But there are some hard truths about teaching writing at the university level. Having taught the subject for almost a decade – but in the private university space – please allow me to state my deeply subjective views on the matter.

For any teaching to be purposeful while dealing with intellectually complex material, there have to be some basic conditions in place, which sadly don’t exist in much of Indian higher education. These are: teacher empowerment and relative autonomy; controllable student numbers; cutting-edge infrastructure (like online academic resources and good libraries); and a seminar and workshop enabling pedagogy. In the subject of teaching general writing, academic writing, and domain-specific, discipline-oriented writing, these take the form of small classes, detailed individual attention to a student’s learning evolution, and deep immersion in all aspects of the art, craft, and substance of writing. None of this is possible without investing in stimulating the habit of reading.

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For the subject of writing to become exciting, Indian higher education has to mount huge efforts to make students and commoners drawn to the often lonely but enthralling experience of reading. This applies across many subjects, but especially those that don’t lend themselves typically to storytelling and narrative. Some of the motivation for the NEP 2020 and the UGC’s formulations appear to have come from North American university systems, where every other university has a writing centre with teams of academics across disciplines who dialogically teach students how to write. These didn’t transpire in North America overnight. American school education systems got systematically strengthened over the 20th century, readying bright students to push up the level and quality of university education thereafter. Moreover, federal and state governments there spent heavily on building a public library culture. In short, for reading and writing to become exciting experiences that students build on through their lives, requires tremendous vision and sensitivity, which both the NEP 2020 and the UGC gestures lack.

The question is: How do we make the practices of writing and communication skills attractive and meaningful to the current generation of Indian university students who belong to a cross-section of Indian society and social structures? What do we do to make any student of any subject at any level fall in love with the beauty of language, expression and communication? It’s a near-universal challenge, even in the more prosperous parts of the world, where strong reading and writing cultures obtain.

At a minimum, Indian higher education institutions must make the processes of meaningful reading and writing a thrilling and active experience for educators and learners. Too often, a teacher is overloaded with crazy student numbers, hampered by fragile infrastructure, unsupportive systems, and moth-eaten or non-existent libraries. Though both the NEP 2020 and the UGC speak about the all-important aspect of implementing these steps through various educational bodies run by the Centre and the states, neither are being specific enough about how various branches of government will make these things happen. Both hardly mention the teaching community’s views on ways to improve the status of reading and writing proficiency levels among the university-level student population in the country. Things must change soon.

(Rahul Jayaram is a teacher and writer who believes we are living through the apocalypse @rajayaram)